Virtualization: Do I need it?

By Sonal Shah

Virtualization technology has hit the IT industry by storm. As new vendors enter the market, or software providers integrate it into their product lines, companies are scrambling to figure out ways to implement virtualization throughout their organizations.  It's becoming more and more critical that anyone involved in technology understand the concept of virtualization ... QUICK!  For those of us who are not intimately involved with the technology, understanding the value that virtualization provides can be challenging. It can be difficult to quickly highlight the key benefits of virtualzation to a management team if you don't fully understand them yourself.  Outlined below are a few key benefits of virtualization that every tech savvy individual should know ...

One of the greatest benefits that virtualization brings to the table is cost reduction. By reducing the number of physical servers in a data center, you greatly reduce hardware maintenance costs and increase space utilization efficiency. Server consolidation has become one of the most "popular" cost reducing IT initiatives in enterprises today. Virtualization allows companies to reduce the number and types of servers that support their business which  leads to significant cost savings.  By going through the server consolidation exercise, companies save energy costs on the consolidated servers and also on the cooling systems utilized within the data centers.  Essentially this entire process also allows you to reduce licensing costs, OS and antivirus licenses to name a few.

Apart from the significant cost savings that virtualization provides, it also allows for organizations to respond more quickly to the demands of their business. With virtualization, you inherently implement various techniques such as partitioning, clustering and workload management.  These techniques allow you to configure servers into reusable pools of resources that better position you to respond to business needs.  Virtualization also allows you to deploy multiple operating system technologies on a single hardware platform. As these techniques are implemented, it allows you to deploy your administrators more efficiently, therefore reducing unnecessary administration costs.

If the Service Level Agreements (SLA) for your critical applications promise a high or continuous level of up time, and chances are they do, then you want to ensure that any activity performed in that environment doesn't impact the entire environment.  Virtualization allows you to "house" each application in it's own "virtual server" to prevent one application from impacting another application when upgrades or changes are made. 

The benefits of virtualization are so great that an organization is essentially doing an injustice, not only to it's bottom line, but also to it's employees by not embracing it.  To truly understand the benefits, pay a visit to your local server admin, developer and data center server team and let them outline how virtualization can greatly improve their efficiency.  The real question that every organization should be asking themselves is not 'what are the benefits of virtualization?', but rather 'what are the implications of not fully embracing virtualization in the enterprise?'

Sonal Shah is an Associate Partner at Solstice Consulting LLC.  She has over 12 years of experience in delivering IT programs, and specializes in infrastructure optimization and virtualization.